Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  Given that we touch upon current political events in these talks, we decided to print the conversations in the order they were recorded rather than in the chronological order of the historical figures we discuss.

  As outstanding intellectuals, all the Black prophetic figures in this book offer astute analyses of the mechanisms of power that help us discern these very mechanisms in the different shapes they take today. As organic intellectuals and activists, they reflect on problems of organizing and mobilizing that may provide useful insights for today’s freedom fights. And as prophets who compassionately and fearlessly face both the evils of our world and the powers that be, they inspire us to do the same.

  This is why we need to talk about Black prophetic fire!

  —CHB

  Frederick Douglass, c. 1850–1860

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  Our conversations on the Black prophetic tradition started in 2008 during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, when, on many occasions, the senator from Illinois would identify himself with Abraham Lincoln. And in his inauguration speech, in January 2009, President Obama strengthened the association with the sixteenth president by using the phrase “a new birth of freedom” from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a theme. Which Lincoln did Obama have in mind? Did Obama acknowledge the role Frederick Douglass and the Abolitionist movement played in making Lincoln the great president we remember? And how could Douglass’s prophetic witness be carried into Obama’s presidency?

  The ascendancy of Barack Obama could easily dampen Black prophetic fire and thereby render critiques of the American system to be perceived as acts of Black disloyalty. Ironically, the incredible excitement of the Obama campaign could produce a new sleepwalking in Black America in the name of the Obama success.

  We recorded our dialogue on Frederick Douglass in the summer of 2009.

  CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: Undoubtedly, Frederick Douglass is a towering figure of nineteenth-century American history in general and African American history in particular. His extraordinary ascent from a slave to the much-admired orator and prominent activist in the Abolitionist movement and the women’s suffrage movement, best-selling author and successful editor of an influential newspaper, United States Marshal, Recorder of Deeds in Washington, and Minister to Haiti, has inspired innumerous African Americans. On the cover jacket of W. E. B. Du Bois’s autobiographical essay Dusk of Dawn there is a photograph showing Du Bois standing before a huge framed portrait of Douglass, which seems to be a strong statement regarding the impact of Douglass on Du Bois. What is your general assessment of Douglass’s influence on both African American and American culture at large?

  CORNEL WEST: Frederick Douglass is a very complicated, complex man. I think that Douglass is, on the one hand, the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century; on the other hand, he is very much a child of his age, which is not to say that he does not have things to teach those of us in the twenty-first century, but he both transcends context and yet he is very much a part of his context at the same time. I think that’s part of the complexity in our initial perception of his influence on America, on Black America, on Du Bois and subsequent freedom fighters.

  CHB: What are the factors we should consider, when you call him a child of his age, and would you say that these factors contribute to reducing his status in a sense?

  CW: I think that his freedom fighting is very much tied to the ugly and vicious institution of white supremacist slavery. Those of us in the post-slavery era experienced Jim Crow and other forms of barbarism, but that’s still different from white supremacist slavery, and we learn from Douglass’s courage, his vision, his willingness to stand up, the unbelievable genius of his oratory and his language. And yet there is a sense in which with the ending of slavery, there was a certain ending of his high moment. He undoubtedly remained for thirty years a very important and towering figure, but for someone like myself, he peaks. It’s almost like Stevie Wonder, who peaks, you know, with Songs in the Key of Life, The Secret Life of Plants, despite his later great moments. There are moments when people peak, and that peak is just sublime; it’s an unbelievable peak. I don’t think any freedom fighter in America peaks in the way Douglass peaks. And that’s true even for Martin Luther King in a certain sense. And yet Douglass lives on another thirty years; that’s a long time. Martin peaked and was shot and killed. Malcolm peaked and was shot and killed. But what if Martin had died in 1998 saying, “Well, what am I? Well, I’m a professor at Union Theological Seminary teaching Christian ethics.” There are different stages and phases of their lives. So it’s not a matter to reduce Douglass, but to contextualize him, to historicize him. And any time you historicize and contextualize, you pluralize; you see a variety of different moments, a variety of different voices. His voice in the 1880s is very different than his voice on July 4, 1852, July 5, 1852.

  CHB: Yes, when he gave his famous speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”1 But while you love the militant Douglass—as did Angela Davis, for example, when she referred to him in the late 1960s2—others seem to appreciate him for his later development, for his integrationist policies. And often Douglass the “race man” is juxtaposed to Douglass the “Republican party man.” Did he become too pragmatic a politician? Was he in his later years out of touch with the ongoing suffering of African Americans? Had he adopted a bourgeois mentality? Did his second marriage to Helen Pitts play a role in his development, as some critics claim?

  CW: I think that the old distinction between the freedom fighter against slavery early on and then the Republican Party man later on might be a bit crude, but it makes some sense, because Douglass in his second stage, the later stages of his life, certainly is significant and never entirely loses sight of trying to fight for the rights of Black people and, by extension, the rights of women and rights of others. But the relevance for us is that he is less international, he is less global in those later years. You see, when he spends time with the Chartist Movement in Britain in the late 1840s—when he is pushed out of the country twice, after publication of the first autobiography, and then following John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry—he makes his connections in Europe, makes the connection between the planetizing, globalizing of the struggle for freedom; whereas in the later phase of his life, Douglass became such a nationalist and a patriot and so US centered. He is so tied in to the machinations of the Republican Party and willing to make vulgar compromises, and he is relatively silent against Jim Crow, and his refusal to speak out boldly, openly, publicly, courageously against barbarism in the South is troubling.

  CHB: But what about his speech against lynching?3

  CW: Yes, but it was a somewhat isolated thing. For example, at the great Freedman’s Memorial ceremony in 1876, when they unveiled Lincoln’s grand statue,4 Douglass hardly makes any reference to what was happening in the South at that time. He says Lincoln is the white man’s president, you are his children, Black people are his step-children, seemingly beginning with a critique. But the twenty thousand Black folk who were there waited for him to say something about the present: nothing, nothing. And then, you see, to allow himself to be used and manipulated by Rutherford B. Hayes,5 so that at the final withdrawal of American troops he is right away appointed to the honorable position of US Marshal of the District of Columbia, as if that were a kind of symbolic exchange, you see.

  You say: “Oh Frederick, Frederick, oh my God! How could you allow that to take place, given who you are, given the tremendous respect that is so well earned that people have for you, especially Black people but all freedom-loving people, and the degree to which once you get caught in the machinations of any political party in the United States as a freedom fighter you are going to be asked to make tremendous concessions, compromises.” The shift from prudence to opportunism looms large. And I think you can see this also in terms of his role in the American imperial apparatus: as he became th
e minister to Haiti and so on. It’s just hard to be that kind of bold, free-thinking, free-speaking, freedom fighter we witness in the early Douglass when you are caught within the political system.

  CHB: I agree. Yet one might still consider that the conditions for fighting for the cause had changed so dramatically that he may have decided to try whatever he could to assist Black people rising within the power system. You said in a recent interview with Jeff Sharlet, one will not find you in the White House.6 But that’s a decision, and once you make a different decision, you will have to compromise. Moreover, we have to historicize again, because there had not been any African American in such eminent political posts before. That in itself was highly significant and symbolic, just as today it is symbolic that Barack Obama is president.

  CW: That’s true. But you can also see the ways in which the political system could seize on the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century, absorb him, incorporate him, diffuse his fire, and make him a part of the establishment, so that the next generation that comes along would have memories of the fiery freedom fighter of the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. But during those last thirty years he is an incorporated elite within a Republican Party, which itself is shot through with forms of white supremacy, not to mention male supremacy, and imperial sensibility. For example, what would a Frederick Douglass in the later part of his life have looked like and what legacy would he have left if he had sided with the populist movement, if he had sided with the working-class movement, multiracial, the way he sided with the multiracial women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls in 1848? It would have sent a whole different set of signs and signals, so that the mainstream would have had difficulties incorporating him. I remember reading Michael Lind’s book on the new American nationalism a few years ago, and the hero is Frederick Douglass.7 He is a hero because he is a representative American; he has got a white father, a Black mother who dies when he is seven; he’s got Native American blood in his mother; he becomes the multicultural icon of America so that he can be incorporated in the latter part of the twentieth century as this patriot, nationalist, multicultural liberal. I mean, he is just tamed; he is defanged in terms of his real power and his buoyancy as a militant freedom fighter. And Michael Lind has grounds for that; Douglass provides grounds for that. Then, of course, when he marries sister Helen Pitts—he marries a white sister—all kinds of controversy break out as well. And part of it has to do with the way he manages that: he just tells the truth about his personal life—out of respect for the people who respected him. He wants some kind of rest and calm and serenity, too, a peaceful place in a luxurious mansion in Anacostia that last decade of his life. But I just wonder what kind of a multiple legacy he would have left if he hadn’t taken the Republican route. Even though, you know, people are who they are and not somebody else.

  CHB: And yet he is very much this heroic icon because people remember his first years.

  CW: There is nobody like him. I mean, I don’t know of any figure in American history whose language and oratory is so full of fire and electricity focusing on a particular form of injustice. I think Douglass stands alone in that regard. He really does. And he was somebody with no formal schooling at all, probably the most eloquent ex-slave in the history of the modern world.

  CHB: Owing to these extraordinary accomplishments, he has often been considered a self-made man. In fact, in 1859, he begins delivering his successful lecture “Self-Made Men” on a tour through the Midwest.

  CW: Now, his attempt to view himself as being a self-made man—a reference made famous by Henry Clay—I am also very critical of that, though. I don’t like this notion of being self-made. I love the degree to which he attempts to make himself in a context where he is dependent on others, but this notion of some isolated monad or some isolated autonomous entity feeds into the worst of American ideology. I prefer Melville’s notion of “mortal inter-indebtedness.”8

  CHB: Yes, American individualism is such a central facet of the American mind. But what I admire in Douglass is that, on the other hand, in his autobiographies, he seems to be quite interested in the factors that both hindered him and furthered him, societal factors that shaped him. He talks a lot about the conditions under which he grew up and which made it harder or easier for him to become what he became, and in that respect he is almost like a sociologist, I think, because he analyzes the system. He is very perceptive when it comes to revealing the master-slave relationship and power structures and so on, and in that sense, I think he is still relevant for us, because those power structures are not yet overcome, after all, even if they were cruder then than they are now. But they still exist.

  CW: That’s true. Yet there are two sets of issues here for me. One is what you rightly note, which is Douglass’s sensitivity to the institutions and structures that serve as obstacles for his flowering as a person and, therefore, by extension the flowering of other persons. But the other side of this is, when you stress those institutions and structures but still view yourself as self-made, it can feed into the worst kind of individualism, even given the sociological analysis that is subtle. For example, you can hear Clarence Thomas talk about what he has overcome. So if he gave an analysis of Jim Crow, if he gave an analysis of institutional racism and discrimination, he would point out the fact that he overcame all of that, he is still a self-made man. There is a sensitivity to the sociological factors, but it is still him in and of himself who triumphs like Horatio Alger. For example, you notice Douglass never mentions his first wife, Anna, in terms of the crucial role she plays in his escape. She is the one who gave him money; she is the one who bought the hat and the clothes; she is the one who gave money to the chap who bore a resemblance to Douglass, who served as the person who bought the pass. Now, how are you going to omit that in your narrative if you are going to be true to the social character of who you are and consequently sensitive to the social structures and the institutions of society?

  There is a sense in which the Horatio Alger ideology can be sociologically astute and still ideologically backwards because of the self-made agent at its center. Douglass tends to feed into that ideology that we associate with Abe Lincoln and going back to Henry Clay all the way up to Clarence Thomas, and it’s a very blinding, obscuring, and obfuscating ideology that, for me, is quite dangerous. There is a sense in which, for me, piety is central. Piety is but a way of talking about the reverent attachment that we have to those in family, in social movements, in civic institutions, in various social networks who help make us who we are. So Douglass should be the first who would have to say he was made, in part, by the Abolitionist movement. There is no great Frederick Douglass without William Lloyd Garrison. But on the other hand, he helped make the movement. There is no great Abolitionist movement without Frederick Douglass, you see. There is no great Frederick Douglass without Wendell Phillips—Phillips and Garrison, of course, the two who wrote the dedicating narratives for the first autobiography.9 But once you take this kind of socially infused notion of piety that I accent—and I spent a lot of time on this in my memoir10—then you recognize what goes into that self as a supposedly self-made person, and then you are also sensitive to the structures and institutions as well; then you get, it seems to me, a much fuller and truer treatment of who we are as persons, as individuals, socially mediated persons and individuals. So that, again, I don’t want to appear too obsessed with his limitations, but I’m very sensitive to his limitations given his iconic status.

  CHB: In contrast to you, though, historians have emphasized the self-made man concept. I have hardly come across any comments that stressed the interrelation between the individual Douglass and society, or that underlined Douglass’s own acknowledgments of what he owed to others. It is true, indeed, and it has been criticized often, that he hardly ever mentions the women who loved and supported him. Besides his first wife, Anna, and his second wife, Helen, there is, for example—

  CW: Julia Griffin and the German sister, Ottilie Assing.


  CHB: Right. But, nevertheless, he gives us many facts about his life recognizing circumstances where it is not due to him but to others that he can go forward.

  CW: Take his name itself, “Douglass,” from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake,” from the chap in New Bedford whose name was Johnson. Remember, he says, “Too many Johnsons in town; it’s too many Johnsons in town.” He gives him a new name, “Douglas,” and Douglass adds an “s” because he remembers a street in Baltimore. That’s part of the inter-dependency; that’s part of the piety in terms of acknowledging that one is indebted to and dependent on others in shaping you, and it becomes a source of good in your life, and it becomes the very launching pad for you in terms of your future, the wind at your back in the present. So, you’re right that he notes those. But I don’t think he accents those. I think that’s one of the reasons why historians so easily assimilate him into this very narrow individualistic ideology, you see. And it could be that Douglass deliberately crafted himself in such a way that he would be acceptable to an American culture that tends to accent self-made men and later on maybe women, and that to me warrants criticism, you know, because it’s just not the truth of who we became over time.

  CHB: Yes, you are right. But as someone with a special interest in relational sociology, I am trying to pay attention to the analysis of the societal structures he provides, as well as to the contingent elements in his life. For example, when he is on the plantation of Master Lloyd, he happens to have frequent contact with the youngest son of Master Lloyd, Daniel, and in the first autobiography, he remarks only in passing that it was due to that contact that he learned standard English. Whereas in the first autobiography, he emphasizes that Master Daniel would protect him and divide his cakes with him,11 and in My Bondage and My Freedom, he writes that Master Daniel “could not give his black playmates his company, without giving them his intelligence, as well,12 it is only in Life and Times, the third autobiography, that he explains at length what to many Northerners was a mystery, namely, how he “happened to have so little of the slave accent in my speech.”13 He acknowledged then that, owing to his companionship with Daniel, he had learned the dominant language and thus was able to turn into a successful orator immediately after he had fled the South, which I doubt he could have, if he had acquired only the Black vernacular. That’s just one example.14